Colin Kenny on the RCMP: Bigger mandate, fewer officers

The RCMP: Bigger mandate, fewer officers

It has been four years since the federal government announced a strategy to reform the RCMP, but the news Canadians are hearing out of headquarters is that the heavy lifting hasn’t even begun. Don’t blame the RCMP for that. Blame its political masters.

The fact that the Prime Minister and his buddies swagger like frontier sheriffs, jawing about the need for law and order, makes it all the more strange that they are starving Canada’s national police service of the infrastructure and resources needed to enforce the law.

Let’s start with money. Every report published over the last decade on the need for RCMP reform has been blunt about the fact that the RCMP is understaffed, that too many officers are burning out and that the Canadian public is never going to get the policing it deserves without a significant funding increase.

The latest report, released last month, was co-authored by Linda Duxbury, a Carleton University business professor who has been studying the RCMP for years. It concludes that personnel shortages and onerous off-duty responsibilities, in conjunction with an intolerant corporate structure, are destroying the family lives of police officers across the country.

That shouldn’t be news. The Senate committee on national security and defence concluded a couple of years ago that the RCMP needs another 5,000 personnel to perform the roles that politicians keep piling on. David McAusland, who was chair of the RCMP Reform Implementation Council, pointed out repeatedly in his reports that the RCMP reform process wasn’t going anywhere unless the government came up with a bundle of cash.

Instead, the government is subtracting rather than adding. The RCMP is going to undergo the same kind of cutbacks that other government departments are currently being subjected to.

How a law-and-order government determined that cutting back on its national police service — while expanding that service’s responsibilities — fit within its ideological drive to shrink government is beyond me. Ditto for shrinking police capacity while spending $8-billion to expand prisons.

Even before the cutbacks come into play, RCMP attrition appears to be outstripping recruitment. The RCMP expects to recruit 736 members a year for the next three years. Unfortunately, one estimate has it that the service will lose close to 1,000 members a year over the same period.

Obviously, the resources just aren’t available to deal with the kind of stress that Duxbury and her colleagues have documented. In 2010, the RCMP decided to go ahead with a pilot project modelled after a Canadian Forces program — Operational Stress Injury Social Support (OSISS). That program helps rehabilitate soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Dr. Greg Passey of the British Columbia Stress Injury Clinic has been quoted as saying that more police officers suffer from PTSD than do soldiers.

Guess what? The RCMP has announced that it has cancelled its plans for the pilot project, arguing that it “has in place policies and programs that promote a healthy and safe work environment.” Really? That’s certainly not the kind of environment we’ve been hearing about in the headlines. No money available — that’s my guess.

Money isn’t the only problem. Report after report has called for structural reform that would remove the RCMP from the bureaucratic maze in Ottawa while at the same time subjecting it to independent civilian review to assure the public that officers are under control.

Last month, both RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson and his British Columbia deputy, Craig Callens, publicly begged for the power to fire rogue officers with cause, or to at least suspend them without pay. But because the RCMP is treated as just one more department in the federal bureaucracy, officers with blatant misconduct records get paid to hang around forever.

Bureaucrats who know nothing about policing pull the strings on how the nation’s police service deploys its resources and manages and disciplines its employees. Expert after expert has recommended that the RCMP become a separate employer from the government, to no avail.

Neither internal nor external complaints against rogue officers tend to get them fired, because the Commission of Public Complaints Against the RCMP is toothless. Instead of strengthening this commission or setting up a new independent civilian review body, the government fired the CPC’s last commissioner for telling the truth about his office’s impotence. As Helene Desabrais (a former RCMP officer who quit after repeated harassment), remarked last month, “As long as the RCMP is investigating itself, nothing will ever change.”

The class action suits that are starting to mushroom paint a picture of a police service that is riddled with unfairness, particularly toward women and minorities.

Expand the prisons. Shrink the police. Fail to act on needed reforms. There’s a formula for justice that’s bound to baffle the civilized world.

National Post

Colin Kenny is former chair of the Senate committee on national security and defence.